


sugar rush

by DylanOhbrien



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Grocery Store, Awkward Flirting, Fluff, Food Metaphors, Klanceweek2k16, Love Confessions, M/M, Oblivious Keith (Voltron), Symbolism, keith has enounters of the lance kind, lance just thought keith was all about keeping up his aesthetic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-04
Updated: 2016-08-04
Packaged: 2018-07-29 08:57:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7678132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DylanOhbrien/pseuds/DylanOhbrien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Keith has a bit of a sweet tooth. Lance is just trying his best.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>"You're flirting with me?"</em>
</p><p> <em>"I have been for the past three months, but thanks for noticing."</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	sugar rush

**Author's Note:**

> I had no idea Klance Week was a thing until literally today. So please take what I managed to scrape together for day one.
> 
> If I had known earlier, this definitely would have been angsty and not about snack foods. But here we are.
> 
> 2/14/18 EDIT: The title always bugged me so I finally bit the bullet and changed it. It used to be "The Nuances of Color" but ummm no. Also I edited one tiny part, but for the most part the fic remains unchanged.

Keith tends to keep it to himself, but he's got a bit of a sweet tooth. Generally, it goes unnoticed by most of his friends. No one bats an eye when Keith's gloved hand reaches to take another piece of the chocolate filled bag Hunk kindly offers. They seem to be none the wiser to the bottles and cans of soda Keith keeps stocked in a cabinet in his apartment. It's easy enough to excuse licking your fingers clean after eating a few powdered donuts, even if Keith is a bit more thorough than others.

Those terrible eating habit of his starkly contrast the rest of his lifestyle, which is heavily focused on health. Keith turned one of his spare rooms into a personal gym, for goodness sake. He takes daily runs through the wooded trail near his apartment complex, and occasionally goes to an actual gym to use machines he doesn't have access to at home.

So Keith keeps the sugary eating habits to himself to avoid any stern speeches from Shiro, or relentless teasing from Lance. Lance's teasing alone is certainly enough of an incentive.

Despite almost a whole year of tentative friendship predated by years of constant fighting and bickering - or perhaps despite what more recently seems to have grown into dangerous affection of a nature that is definitely not platonic - Lance making jokes at Keith's expense would never be a thing of the past. Even if Keith had attempted to put an end to them in good faith, Lance never knew when to quit. Nowadays, the teasing is far more playful and lacking any sort of heat to it, but the barrage was endless, and even Keith had his limits. Unplatonic feelings be damned.

Allura likes to to throw in an occasional good natured jab of her own, comparing Keith and Lance's relationship to fire and ice, hot and cold, day and night, passive aggressive and just flat out aggressive. She'd once called them the sun and moon.

(Lance, unlike Keith, hadn't found a single problem with it. He'd just called dibs on being the sun.

Keith had to begrudgingly agree it was the more fitting symbol for Lance, who was all warm tan skin and shining eyes and a seemingly never ending amount of bright energy.)

Still, secrets, no matter how minute and unimportant, are meant to be discovered. It's basically some strange otherworldly law. So when a shopping cart rams into Keith just as he's placing a box full of cans of Pepsi into his own cart, any hope of keeping his sweet tooth to himself is shattered. Because when Keith looks up with a scowl, it's immediately wiped off his face when he sees Lance casually leaning against the cart that’s his own, cheek resting in the palm of his hand.

“So,” Lance starts. “fancy meeting you here. You come here often?”

“To the supermarket?” Keith asks in a deadpan voice, anger filtering out to make room for resignation. Keith gently places the Pepsi box down before even bothering to deign Lance with a real response.

Lance, ever the charmer, isn't deterred in the slightest. “Where else would I mean? My dreams? Well, I mean, you are there too, I must admit. But this is far more tangible.”

Keith ignores the fact that his ears burn at that terrible attempt of flirting. It's been something Lance had started picking up more recently as a new form of teasing know the past few months, and Keith does not like the way those cheesy words leave him feeling all warm and light, no way (except he kind of does). He refuses to rise to this particular challenge that Lance had recently poised though, no matter how incessant the taller boy might be.

“Go away, Lance,” Keith grounds out, rolling his eyes. “Just let me do my shopping in peace.”

Wrong thing to say, because those bright eyes of Lance move away from Keith's face down to the cart right at his side. The cart which is full of soda, candy, chips, and an all around death wish with the amount of sugary treats piled into it just sit out in the open, as if taunting Keith for his terrible life choices. There's a raise of Lance's eyebrow as he takes in Keith's inventory and then looks back up at Keith, boring holes into him. Or more accurately, his chest.

“I have a question,” Lance says after a minute, lips pursing. He points down at Keith's cart and says, “how does _that_ ,” and then gestures towards Keith's abdomen, “not affect _that_ in any way, shape, or form? Because I gotta say, if you've been eating this type of shit the whole time and still have those kind of abs, then that's just unfair.”

The blush reaches Keith's cheeks this time around. Without a word, Keith backs his cart from where Lance had collided with it, and turns it around with all intentions of leaving the other man where he stood. Lance laughs (dammit, it's a nice laugh) and just trails along after Keith without a problem, mouth opening and yup, it was just a bunch of useless shit pouring out.

“You know, I totally would've pinned you for a health nut with the way you're so about exercise twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. But, like, I literally see not a single fruit or vegetable in your cart. Not even Gatorade, which is pretty much the life staple of all athletes, right?” Lance's constant talking follows Keith into the next aisle, and try as he might to ignore it, Lance is nothing if not persistent. “I myself am a fan of Cool Blue, which isn't really a flavor. Blue isn't a flavor, it's a color.”

“Fascinating.” It really isn't, but Keith won't tell anyone if he makes a point to remember Lance's favorite Gatorade flavor. Whatever.

Lance laughs. “Chill out, Spock. So what's your favorite Gatorade, then?”

“The red one,” Keith answers, pushing the cart forward.

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Lance nod his head and let out a hum. “Fruit punch. A classic. I can get down with that. I do have a complaint though, unrelated to Gatorade flavors.”

Keith sighs and finally stops his cart halfway through the aisle, and turns to look at Lance. Lance looks absolutely pleased as a peach that Keith actually stopped.

“Wouldn't be you if you didn't.”

Lance's smile is unabashed and unfairly beautiful, as if the response pleased him somehow, and then he immediately does a one-eighty and frowns at Keith's cart, eyebrows furrowing in confusion. “Why'd you get Pepsi?”

“I… like Pepsi?” Keith says slowly, phrasing it like a question. What the hell was Lance getting at here?

Lance rolls his eyes, but Keith doesn't miss that there isn't any real heat behind the gesture. If it only been a few months in the past, he would have goaded Keith until they were having a shouting match next to the cereal. Which had happened once, and they'd gotten kicked out of the store as a result.

Now, Lance just nudges Keith with his shoulder. “You just seem like a Coke guy, is all. Kinda follows your whole theme, you feel me?” As if to prove a point, he gestures to the cart. “You know, KitKats, Red Vines, you even told me you like the Fruit Punch Gatorade? Not to mention that gaudy jacket you always wear. I just thought it would fit your whole shtick.”

At Keith's blank stare - because _what_? - Lance just heaves out a sigh. “Red, you got a lot of red. Honestly I just thought it was an aesthetic kinda thing, you know, like Pidge always wears big ass sweaters even when it's like a thousand degrees out.”

“Lance, I'm not purposely aiming to get only red food to make some kind of statement. I just get what I like. And anyway, you never shut up about blue colored candy,” Keith points out as a response. “If anyone goes out of their way to get something strictly for the color, it's you.”

“Damn straight,” Lance says, like it's a quirky fact he's proud of. “Blue is fucking crazy. Like, whose idea was it to make blue candies have a raspberry taste? I want to write them a strongly worded letter about all the shit I had to go through as a kid before I finally found out what raspberries really looked like.”

“You're reading way too much into this, Lance,” Keith says with a roll of his eyes, and starts to push his shopping cart again. He has every intention of leaving Lance in the aisle to ponder the nuances of candy flavors, but the taller boy seems to snap out of his stupor at the slightest squeak of Keith's tires and starts to follow again.

He's quiet for a moment, and Keith plucks a cereal off one of the shelves, pointedly ignoring the fact that it's red. Whatever Lance, it's just the color of the box, not the cereal itself that's red. Screw you.

Lance, finally content with whatever the hell he had been mulling over, asks, “Can I come over to your apartment?”

“What? Why?” Keith frowns and tries his best to keep the butterflies flaring up in his stomach at the thought of being alone with Lance in is apartment. It doesn't really work.

“Curious to see how much red food you've got,” Lance says casually, and then leans in, face morphing into a suggestive leer. “If you want, this could be our first date.”

Keith squints at Lance, ignoring - or, well, trying his best to - the light feeling in his heart from having Lance murmur sweet nothings at him. “There's nothing romantic about what you just suggested.”

“Now that's not true. You know what they say, red is the color of passion and love,” Lance says, and it the way it comes out of Lance's mouth makes it seem like a joke. He sounds so lighthearted and teasing, but Keith doesn't miss the small flicker of emotions that flit across Lance's face that betray the boy's inner feelings. Now, Keith isn't the greatest at deciphering facial expressions, but Lance looks downright _nervous_. Lance bites hit lip - _bashful_ \- and then looks at Keith through his eyelashes - _tentative_ \- and says, “Who knows what'll happen?” in a soft voice.

Keith realizes me may be an idiot. The words are out of his mouth before he can stop them.

“You're flirting with me,” Keith says, and _oh,_  it finally clicks, after all those disgustingly cliche pickup lines Lance has been throwing his way. Keith repeats himself, still a little unsure, but the hope bubbling in his chest is enough to keep him pressing forward. “You're flirting with me?”

“I have been for the past three months, but thanks for noticing,” Lance says plainly after that, but Keith can see the flush on his cheeks just as easy as he can see the freckles that dot them. This is basically a confession. From the guy he used to hate, but now undeniably does not. In the middle of a supermarket. Where Keith has a shopping cart full of junk food.

So this is what Keith's life has brought him to. It's all well and good except that it's really not.

(But it definitely is.)

Keith blinks, and then blushes all the way down to his shoes. It's one thing to figure it out, it's another thing altogether to have Lance just confirm it not a moment later. Lance had been flirting with him the whole time, and Keith had just assumed it to be a new teasing method. Lance had been _flirting_ with him.

“I didn't know,” Keith admits with a cough.

Lance rolls his eyes again. “I know, I figured. Hunk suggested I just try to make it really obvious, but you still hadn't caught on and I started getting a little discouraged by it all. Pidge just told me to be upfront with you, so here I am. Being upfront.”

Keith picks at a loose piece of plastic off the cart. After a moment, he says, “I think we could probably have a better first date than you taking inventory of the food I have in my apartment.”

“Is that a yes to a date then?” Lance asks, and oh no that hopeful tone in his voice shoots through Keith and sinks deep into his bones. He's so gone for Lance, it's ridiculous.

Keith nods. “That's a yes, Lance.”

Lance's face breaks out into a beautiful smile, so bright and happy and open, and Keith is reminded of the sun.

“So, you like me, huh?” Lance asks, successfully shattering whatever moment was happening. Keith smiles despite that.

And anyway, Lance's little personality quirks were growing on him.

“Yes, Lance, I like you. Don't let it get to your head though,” Keith warns, lips curling up and warmth blooming in his chest.

Lance grins and leans in for what is definitely about to be a kiss, stopped only by Keith's hand on his chest.

“Nope, no, we are not having our first kiss next to boxes of Captain Crunch. Not happening,” Keith says, turning away from Lance's face.

“Wanna go to the dairy aisle instead?” Lance asks, eyebrows wiggling.

“No, I mean you're coming over later, and it _won't_ be to count how many red foods I have in my pantry,” Keith says, and leaves Lance in the aisle, face bright red and mouth agape.

Keith smirks to himself, and wonders if Lance falls underneath the red things Keith likes category with the color of his face right now.

He bets Lance's kisses are sweet.

**Author's Note:**

> Only I use Gatorade and soda as a symbolism for Keith and Lance's relationship. Why am I like this?


End file.
